Three Cathay Poems Revisited

The publication of Ezra Pound’s Cathay in 1915 not only inspires the rise of western modern poetry but also helps to bridge the east and the west. Most of Pound scholars focus on the field of translation when they analyze Cathay. Some do the research from the perspective of the Chinese poetics. Cultural studies on Cathay are also quite popular. No matter whether Cathay is studied from the perspective of translation strategies or from the perspective of inter-cultural studies, we should bear in mind that it is both a literary work itself and a translation project. The pioneer of the triple comparison of the original Chinese poem, Fenollosa’s notes and Pound’s Cathay is Yip Wai-lim whose focus is on the syntactic aspect of the poetry, followed by Zhaoming Qian who made a triple comparison from the aesthetic and thematic aspects. As not all poems from Cathay have been studied with triple comparison. In this thesis, with three-way comparison of Li Bai’s poems, Fenollosa’s notes and the corresponding three poems of Cathay, the author argues that Pound well preserves the terseness of Chinese poems and the connotation of the diction in Chinese poems are also well transmitted; however, due to the different ideology, Pound changes the understanding of the tragedy in Chinese poem and he connects the myth, which is one familiar form to the westerners, with the Chinese poem and explores destiny in the field of myth.